Developers Are Different

Developers are born with a "geek gene." They are certainly different from
managers. Some can play both roles well and shift transparently between them, but
those people are rare. Developers love to write code. It's why they get up in the
morning. When they can do it better than others, when they can know more, they are
rewarded. They derive their security from knowledge and ability.
People drawn to software development (like the authors) tend to be people who
would rather communicate with a machine than with people. Most of them were
labeled "smart" at a young age. They spend years in school learning lots of details
about how to tell machines what to do, which the rest of the world find about as
entertaining as watching grass grow. They complete programming assignments
alone, since getting help would be cheating. When they graduate, they get paid big
salaries. After a few months on the job, managers realize that developers don't play
well with other people. Duh.
XP rebels against deeply ingrained programmer habits by forcing these folks to
interact with people most of the time. They resist.